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Psst, wanna buy a cellphone?: Fiorito

Victoria was at a club on King St. on the evening of Dec 28. She reached into her purse around midnight to check her messages. No phone, not there, nowhere.

She immediately talked with the bartenders, club security, and the people running the coat check; nothing doing. She was sick to her stomach.

But as you will see, thanks to her quick thinking, the police have just taken down what appears to be an extensive gang of phone thieves.

Victoria is a student at George Brown. She is taking hotel management and she is on the dean’s list. Her phone is crucial. “I use it for email, for texts, for phone calls, for the web and for Facebook.” Above all, she uses it for school. George Brown College sends assignments and marks to students by email.

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“We have group projects. In every class, you have to contact your group. We’re doing a seven-week project, so I call people, and we send mass texts.”

She uses an iPhone. “There’s a tracker. My friend also has an iPhone. We activated the tracker on my phone and I immediately locked it; we put my friend’s number on the lock. I still thought I might have misplaced it. I was hoping someone nice would phone to say they had it.”

No one called.

“I was bawling my eyes out — all my addresses, photos, emails.” Word to the wise: some of this stuff was backed up on her computer.

“I woke up the next morning and turned on my computer. The app had been activated somewhere near Victoria Park and Lawrence. My friend said she had it pinpointed to an apartment building.”

Victoria went there with her dad. They looked everywhere around the building, in case it had been ditched. Nothing turned up.

“I phoned the police. They said they couldn’t take a report over the phone, but they’d call back in 48 hours.” She rolled her eyes. “I told them I just had my phone stolen.” In the end, she filed her report online.

In the meantime, her friend got a call two days later. “It was from a gentleman.” Oh, and you should have heard the scorn in her voice when she said, “gentleman.”

“He was calling from a blocked number. He claimed he purchased my phone on Kijiji for $400. He said he’d taken it to two shops and couldn’t unlock it.”

The gentleman apparently offered to return the data on the phone if she’d unlock it for him. That’s no offer; she’s not stupid. There were other conversations with the gentleman; the girls were smart enough to record one of the calls.

In the meantime, Victoria’s friend got a call from someone who didn’t respond when she picked up; a little social media sleuthing revealed that the number on the call display was associated with three other phones being sold on Kijiji.

That’s when Victoria’s dad stepped in. He figured he could run a sting: call the number, propose a meeting, show up at a coffee shop, do the deal. And then all his buddies would step in from the surrounding booths and explain things the hard way to the gentleman.

In the meantime, Victoria was increasingly frustrated with the efforts of the cops. Surely they could track the gentleman down and surely they could teach him a lesson about theft. She thought the cops were slow off the mark.

In fact, police had been concerned about a year-long flurry of cellphone thefts and Victoria’s information, including the tape, provided the key that unlocked the case. It is, of course, more complicated than that, and it involves a lot of old-fashioned police work and new-fangled social media sleuthing.

Police have just arrested five, um, gentlemen and charged them with possession of property obtained by crime, and possession of property obtained by crime for the purpose of trafficking; 18 charges in all.

Police also seized 150 stolen iPhones.

You know how cops give names to investigations?

This one was Operation Ringback.

And here I can tell you that it is possible to obtain brand-new iPhone boxes, complete with manual, cords and earphones, all of which make the selling of stolen phones look right; also that it is possible to make a hot cellphone look brand-new for $40, in order to sell it for $400.

A curious detail: all but one of the thefts last year were reported by young women; you can bet most of them have bought new phones by now.

And a chilling thought: you have to wonder what happened to all that stolen data.

The police have yet to find Victoria’s phone. But if there’s any satisfaction, she knows that the case would not have been cracked without her quick thinking, and that of her friend.

A final note:

Det. Const. Ron Chhinzer suspects there are many more thefts that have not been reported. If your iPhone was stolen, you can reach him by email: Ron.Chhinzer@torontopolice.on.ca

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